Looking For Something To Praise

From April 13 to May 4 I stayed at the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. The hotel is as ugly as a bunker, with unpainted cement as an exterior, and it feels like a bunker, too, because there’s no shortage of security around its perimeter. Private guards, police, paramilitary. Business was getting back to usual while I was there, after the kidnapping and murder, in January, of Daniel Pearl. I checked out on Sunday and returned to New York. This morning a large bomb exploded outside the Sheraton, killing 15, including a dozen French citizens in a bus. My photographer, who stayed behind, had fortunately repaired to his bathroom moments before the blast; not only were the windows blown out of his room on the seventh floor, so was the door. A mutilated world indeed.